Dániel Horpácsi is a third year PhD student at Eötvös Loránd University. His teaching and research activities are grouped around the theory of programming languages, including topics such as formal semantics, static code analysis, compilers and methods of verification in functional languages. He investigates Erlang-related questions and uses the language for development ever since he joined the RefactorErl project in 2007.

Dániel Horpácsi is Giving the Following Talks

Extending Erlang by utilizing RefactorErl

RefactorErl is a widely known refactoring tool for Erlang. It is very good at static source code analysis as well as at program transformations. So far we only created semantics-preserving Erlang-to-Erlang program transformations, so-called refactorings.

Apparently, no one programming language has a syntax that fits everybody's desires. You can do your tricks with macros, and especially in Erlang, with parse transformations you can associate new meaning to constructs already present in the language. But what if this is not enough and you really wish to extend the language or introduce a syntactic sugar? We present a technique for customizing Erlang by building on the various features of RefactorErl. In particular, we demonstrate the method by implementing user-defined operators in Erlang by only changing a few lines in RefactorErl.

Talk objectives: Give the idea of using a refactoring tool to extend a programming language.